from IPython.display import *
import pandas as pd, numpy as np, plotly.express as px
from IPython.display import *
import json, os, re, requests, nltk
from wordcloud import *
from PIL import Image
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
stopwords = STOPWORDS.union(set(nltk.corpus.stopwords.words("english")))
def character_count(chapters, characters, so_far = True):
    counts = {name : np.char.count(chapters, name) for name in characters}
    mentions = pd.DataFrame(counts)
    if so_far:
        mentions = mentions.cumsum()
    labels = {"variable":"Character", "index":"Chapter", "value": "Times Mentioned"}
    return px.line(mentions, labels=labels, template="seaborn")

def make_wordcloud(text, mask, color):
    if mask:
        mask_img = np.array(Image.open(mask))
    else:
        mask_img = None
    wc = WordCloud(background_color="white", max_words=3000, stopwords=stopwords, 
              contour_width = 1, min_font_size=1, width = 2000, height = 1200,
              contour_color = color,mask=mask_img, scale = 2)
    wc.generate(text);
    plt.imshow(wc, interpolation='bilinear');
    plt.axis("off");
    plt.show();
    if mask:
        display(Image.open(mask))
HTML("literacy.html")

Literacy Autobiography

by Jonathan Ferrari

        metaData = \
        {
         "Semester": 2023.getSemester("Spring"),
         "GSI": "Rafa",
         "Professor": "Hull",
         "Date": date.getYear(2023).getMonth(03).getDay(12).getWeekday("Sunday");
        }

Literacy is integral to life in the modern world. It has been a topic of though for many of the world's greatest minds. For now, I'll let two of my favorite histogrical figures tell you about why they think literacy is so important.

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

- Frederick Douglass (1845)

More than 150 years later, Carl segan references Douglass when he says:

Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.

Carl Segan (1997)

HTML("intro.html")

Multimodality

My name is Jonathan, and this is a story of my ongoing journey of becoming literate. However, as you may have noticed, this story has a bit of a twist in its presentation. This is going to be a meta-exploration of my literacy journey. I will be telling the story of my literacy, specifically in relation to particular books, and the roles they played in my literary development. However, I will also be incorporating elements of another type of literacy: Data and Computer Science . Through my fieldwork, I investigate literacy through the lens of students learning Data Science. I have a passion for Data Science and Computer Science, and it too is a type of literacy. So, I thought it fitting to tell a story of my literary journey while using another form of my literacy to add another level of literary exploration. As such, this entire Multimodal Autobiography has been written using a mixture of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python.

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Purpose and Goals

Through this autobiography I hope to give the reader insights into my experience in becoming literate. Because this is a huge story to cover, I will focus on my literary journey through specific experiences and pieces of literature that I feel are especially relevant and meaningful in telling the story of my ongoing literacy journey. As mentioned above, I have chosen to incorporate one of my additional modes as pieces of code, and another as text and images that have been styled and rendered using code. I have chosen to incorporate these modes as they are incredibly important to who I am today, as I practice computer science throughout my life. Furthermore, I am also currently on a journey of becoming literate in coding languages. Finally, this mode adds to the autobiography as I have been engaging with course material in relation to my fieldwork, which takes place in the context of Computer and Data Science education. I hope that by reading my literacy autobiography, the reader will be able to experience with me some of the defining moments of my journey and be able to understand a little bit more about who I am today, and why literacy is important to me.

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Introduction and Context

While this is my story, it would be remiss of me to not mention my family, who are the reason I have such a passion for literacy and reading. My household was one which encouraged me to always further my education, and my vocabulary, and generally one which fostered learning and allowed me to become the person I am today. My mother is an elementary school teacher, so education is naturally very important to her. She always pushed me to read as much as I could. She herself was an avid reader and loved fiction as she felt it was an escape from the sometimes bleak realities of the world (of course she did not tell me this reasoning as a child). I was extremely lucky to have such a parent figure in my life who encouraged me throughout my development to expand my horizons and learn new things. As I mentioned earlier, my mother is a schoolteacher. She taught quite far from where we lived so she commutedeach day. One unique aspect of my childhood is that I commuted with her every day, as I went to the same school where she taught. This commute was about 45 minutes each way, so about an hour and a half each day. It was during this time that I was able to transport myself to far-off places with my head buried in my books. Because I had so much time to read, I read quite a few books. I remember making trips to the library most weekends, to pick out a few new books which I could read the coming week. With the perfect combination of an encouraging mother, the free time to read, and access to almost unlimited books at the library and at home, it is no wonder I developed a love of reading and that this translates to a passion for literacy. My maternal grandfather (my mother’s father) was also a key figure in my literacy journey. While my mother encouraged me to read for pleasure, he encouraged me to read to learn new things. One such example of this that I can remember vividly happened while I was in elementary school. My grandparents lived very close to my family, so I visited quite often. One time in particular I asked my grandfather about how clocks work. He was one of the smartest people I have ever met, and so I always went to him with any questions I had about the world. He said, “Give me one minute, I’ll be right back”. He went to his study and returned with a large, colorful book. This book has become one of my all-time favorite pieces of literature. The book was called The Way Things Work; it taught about how basic machinery, such as clocks, work, as well as explained some simple physics relating to these machines. My grandfather flipped to the middle of the book, and read aloud the section on how (analog) clocks work. When I was leaving, my grandfather said, “Don’t forget this!”, and handed me that book. Unfortunately, about five years ago, my grandfather passed away from medical complications. However, The Way Things Workstill lives on as a symbol that to me, represents one of the greatest men I have ever known. While the book has a special place in my heart and memories, it also has a special place on my bookshelf. In fact, I can see it now from my desk where I am writing this. As this special memory shows, literacy can form strong emotional connections between individuals and strengthen already existing ones.

---

HTML("childhood.html")

Childhood: Discovery of Interests

While I had many people to encourage me to read, eventually I began to form my own interest in reading; for instance, as a young child, I had a fascination with Greek Mythology, which I will speak about later in this section. This section will explore the story of how this, one of my first original literary interests, came to be. During the summers I would sometimes spend all day reading. My local library hosted an event each summer that I waited for all year. It was a competition to see which children from the community could read the most books. They had rewards for reading a certain number of books over the summer. One prize, for instance, was a free ticket to UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science; to get this you had to read 20 books over the course of the summer. The library didn’t expect many kids to complete this task, and in fact, few did; to my knowledge only about 10 of us did. However, I was a bit of an outlier that they didn’t account for. I remember one of these summers quite vividly. I was about ten years old at the time; I was ready to take on the challenge. That summer I read the required 20 books within the first 3 weeks (granted they weren’t long books). I went into the library and asked if I could enter the program again and read 20 more books. The librarian was a bit hesitant but allowed me to get a new record tracking sheet. The librarian was a bit more hesitant the second time this happened…and the third and fourth times as well. I tried for a fifth, but I didn’t quite make it to 100 books by the time the summer was over. Regardless, by early August, I had accrued four free tickets to the Lawrence Hall of Science, which soon became one of my favorite attractions in the Bay Area, which is where my family is from. Because my mother was a teacher, we both had a few weeks off before school started back up. So, my mother took me, four days in a row, to the science exhibits at the Lawrence Hall of Science, where it feels like I saw everything they had to offer. It was here that one of my other academic interests developed, that of the physical sciences. As an aside, it was during this week that I decided I wanted to attend UC Berkeley once I graduated high school, and here I am today. This is just one example of how literacy can change a person’s life in immense ways, even if the effects seem small at the time. I’m not sure if I would be here today if I had not participated in that contest. While I explored many exhibits at the museum, there was one that piqued my interest above the others; at the time, it was called Posiden’s Rivers. In the exhibit, there were multiple boards you could place at different parts of the exhibit which changed the flow of the water in sometimes unpredictable ways. This naming was a bit fortuitous, as one of the ways I read so many books that summer was that I read lots of Greek Mythology from my local library. I was fascinated by the awesome tales of Gods, Heroes, and the underlying lessons in such stories. That summer and over the following years, I read many pieces of Greek Mythology (which were simplified for children), including The Tale of Prometheus, Pandora’s Box, The Tale of The Minotaur, and my personal favorite Daedalus and Icarus. In case you are unfamiliar with the tale of Icarus, here is a brief synopsis of the fable:
“According to the story, Daedalus, a mythical inventor, created wings made of feathers and wax to escape from Crete where he and his son, Icarus, were held captive by King Minos. Icarus, however, ignored his father's warnings and flew too close to the sun. His wings melted and he fell into the sea where he met his end”
- (Chaliakopoulos, 2021)
The story is significant in my literacy journey because it is the first text I recall reading where I was truly able to glean a meaningful moral from the story on my own. While I, in the 21 stcentury, am able to learn lessons from this text, it also taught similar lessons to those who read or listened to the story during the period in which this story was written. Further, this text did not exist in a vacuum; many other texts were written in the same time period and contained similar ideas. James Gee would define this group of literary works as a “Discourse”. In his own words, Gee defines Discourse as,
“a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’” – (Gee, 1989)
As I mentioned earlier, this story, in particular, contains a very prominent moral: that you should not strive for things beyond your means or beyond what is reasonable and expected. Thinking about the time when this was written, it is very possible that this moral served a purpose, and that other pieces of literature within the discourse contained similar morals. One property that Gee mentions about Discourses is that they are,
“inherently ‘ideological’. They crucially involve a set of values and viewpoints in terms of which one must speak and act, at least while being in the discourse, otherwise one doesn’t count as being in it.”
– (Gee, 1989)
In particular, the set of ideologies represented by this discourse likely served as a way of suppressing desires for social change or social mobility, thus stabilizing the class hierarchy of the ancient European world at the time. By showing the misfortune which befalls Icarus, the story discourages ambition and desires for more, which is consistent with other works of the time such as morals from stories like that of King Midas.

Metamorphoses Analysis

In the code below, I am retrieving the text of Metamorphoses: Book VIII from the MIT Classics Department and saving it as text, and then excluding any author information; I just want the text of the book.

Below we make a wordcloud of the most common words in the text!

ovid_url = "http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.mb.txt"
ovid_text = (requests.get(ovid_url)
       .text.split('BOOK THE EIGHTH')[1]
       .split('BOOK THE NINTH')[0])
make_wordcloud(ovid_text, mask=None, color="white")

HTML("adolescence.html")

Adolescence: Deeper Levels of Making Meaning

I continued my interest in literacy until now, however, high school contained a few other relevant experiences that altered the path I followed in my journey. In high school, I took Advanced Placement Language and Composition, where some of my most important literary education took place. In this class, we took part in many activities, such as reading and analyzing famous texts, investigating the origins and contexts of words, and expanding our vocabularies. However, there was one task that I feel caused a paradigmatic shift in the way I viewed literature. This task was analyzing the symbols in the novel The Great Gatsby. We had just finished reading the book over the past few weeks. The rest of the following two weeks was dedicated to looking at the deeper meanings of the text as a class. We had all read the novel on our own time – a few chapters each week as homework. This task forced us to look at the text from the perspective of a few of our classmates. For a little bit of context, I did not perform the best academically in this class; though I had great interest, it seemed that other students were able to grasp the content we learned much more quickly and much more easily than I could. However, I was still interested in what we learned. In the task, we first broke into small groups of about three or four students, and shared some of our perspectives on the novel, and some of our thoughts about the symbols that are present in the novel. I had really liked the book, but compared to many of my classmates, I only looked at the book on a surface level. To me it was an intriguing story about fabulous wealth, extravagant parties, and an unrequited love. However, many of my classmates had reflections based on symbols such as the use of the color gold to represent wealth and power, the green light representing envy and jealousy, among other things. When my classmates provided their interpretations, it was sort of like a light bulb going off in my mind, as if things had just clicked. It was then that I began to view literature not just as a pastime but as sending a deeper message, one more intricate and intertwined with human behavior and ideas that I had originally imagined. When I walked into Mr. Standin’s 2^nd period AP Literature class that day, literature was simply a collection of stories told for enjoyment. When I left room 402, literature was a way to convey meaning, lessons, messages, thoughts, ideas, passions, and an infinite amount of other constructs. While this was sort of a “literary awakening” for me, it was also an positive example of a critical theory in Education – Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). In his own words, Vygotsky defines the ZPD as,
“...the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. … The [ZPD] defines those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation … . These functions could be termed the buds or flowers of development rather than the "fruits" of development. The actual developmental level characterizes mental development retrospectively, while the zone of proximal development characterizes mental development prospectively.”
- (Vygotsky, 1930)
Vygotsky would have said that the understanding of deeper meaning in literacy was inside of my ZPD. Independently, I was unable to come up with these ideas or reflections, however in a group, I was able to see what was there, hidden between the lines on the pages. This type of education allowed me to progress much farther in my studies of literacy than independent study would have allowed me to, and therefore emphasizes and illustrates the importance of social learning to allow for learning within students’ ZPDs.

Gatsby Analysis

In the code below, I am retreiving the text of The Great Gatsby from the Gutenburg Project, Australia, and saving it as text, and then excluding any author information; I just want the text of the book.

I also output a random part of the book so you can see what it looks like

gatsby_url = "https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200041.txt"
gatsby_text = requests.get(gatsby_url).text[1276:-35].replace("\'s", "").replace("\'", "")
gatsby_start = np.random.randint(0, high = 20e4)
print(gatsby_text[gatsby_start:gatsby_start + 500].strip())

r
to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of
enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I began to walk about the room, examining various indefinite objects in
the half darkness. A large photograph of an elderly man in yachting
costume attracted me, hung on the wall over his desk.

"Who this?"

"That? That Mr. Dan Cody, old sport."

The name sounded faintly familiar.

"He dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago."

There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yach

Below, we can make another wordcloud of common words, this time in the shape of Gatsby's famous martini glass

make_wordcloud(gatsby_text, "martini.png", "green")

Here we can look at the amount of times that each character was mentioned!

gatsby_chapters = gatsby_text.split("Chapter")[1:]
gatsby_characters = ["Nick", "Gatsby", "Daisy", "Tom", "Jordan"]
character_count(chapters = gatsby_chapters, characters = gatsby_characters)

HTML("adult.html")

Early Adulthood: Making Change with Literacy

At the start of my college education, I decided that I ought to study literature again; I owed it to my child self who fell in love with the worlds created on pages. Luckily for me, there was a class that focused on literature, specifically ancient Greek and Roman writings, at Berkeley; the class was called Classics R44: Roots of Western Civilization. One piece of literature that I will focus on was a story I had read as a child: Homer’s Odyssey. While the content and deeper meaning of the poem are incredibly important in their own rights, in this class we focused on the effect that the story had on the real world, how the people of the time were influenced and affected by the poem itself. In my previous studies, I had always analyzed and interpreted stories in one of two respects. First, in my younger years, I looked at literature as existing in a vacuum –not tied to any specific point in history; in a word: timeless. Later, I began to think about literature as a reflection of the times; stories represented ideas of the time at which they were written, and the content of the stories was heavily impacted by the time and location in which the piece was written. However, in Classics R44, I began to practice viewing literature in a more complex, more realistic light. Not only is literature impacted and influenced by the times of its creation, but it also has impact and influence on those very same times. I will examine a bit of a case study, one which we covered in that class, the previously mentioned Odyssey. I won’t go over the content of the story in this writing but will examine it in the code below. In this section, I will look at the impact which the poem had upon the Ancient Greek world. There are two main aspects with respect to which Odysseyinfluenced society; the first is by changing societal values, the second is by creating and bringing importance to professions of the literate. Homer’s famous poem was so impactful that it actually changed the ways in which Greeks of the time lived their lives. The poem portrays the main character, Ulysses, as an honorable and heroic man, though not incredibly different from the average Greek citizen of the time. Thus, to the people of Ancient Greece, Ulysses became a symbol of the behavior of an ideal man. In historical writings which record many events such as wars after the writing of Odyssey, people such as generals, kings, and other important historical figures were recorded to have referenced Ulysses in making some of their important decisions. In this way, Homer’s work directly influenced the path that the ancient world embarked upon. While this importance should not be understated, the poem also brought about other changes in value, namely the value placed upon literacy. At the time, not many of the citizens of Greece were literate, at least by the definition of being able to read written language. In the time after Homer finished writing Odyssey, the profession of Bardbecame increasingly important, and the people of the time put lots of value on the profession of storytelling, which required literacy. These bardswould travel from village to village to tell the story of Ulysses, and were graciously welcomed by the residents of each of the towns. It was not uncommon for these bards to receive free room and board in addition to payment for reciting them poem . Thus, the people of the time, directly or indirectly, highly valued literacy. This occurrence is an example of a famous metaphor for literature, pioneered by Sylvia Scrbner, that of Literacy as a State of Grace. In her words,
“In the literacy-as-a-state-of-grace concept, the power and functionality of literacy is not bounded by political or economic parameters but in a sense transcends them; the literate individualís life derives its meaning and significance from intellectual [and] aesthetic … participation in the accumulated creations and knowledge of humankind, made available through the written word.”
- (Scribner, 1984)
As Scribner suggests, those who were literate in this time not only transcended other values of the time with literacy, but the common citizen also recognized the value in the academic, the historical, and the divine.

Odyssey Analysis

In the code below, I am retrieving the text of The Odyssey from the MIT Classics Department and saving it as text, and then excluding any author information; I just want the text of the book.

I also output a random part of the book so you can see what it looks like

odyssey_url = "http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.mb.txt"
odyssey_text = requests.get(odyssey_url).text[262:-559]
odyssey_start = np.random.randint(0, high = 60e4)
print(odyssey_text[odyssey_start:odyssey_start + 500].strip())

every one) the storm winds came and
spirited them away to become handmaids to the dread Erinyes. Even
so I wish that the gods who live in heaven would hide me from mortal
sight, or that fair Diana might strike me, for I would fain go even
beneath the sad earth if I might do so still looking towards Ulysses
only, and without having to yield myself to a worse man than he was.
Besides, no matter how much people may grieve by day, they can put
up with it so long as they can sleep at night, for when

Let's make another wordcloud, but this time of Odyssey!

make_wordcloud(odyssey_text, None, "white")

Here we can look at the amount of times that each character was mentioned!

odyssey_chapters = odyssey_text.split("BOOK")[1:]
odyssey_characters = ["Ulysses", "Telemachus", "Penelope", "Minerva", 
                      "Calypso", "Circe", "Neptune", "Saturn", "Helen"]
character_count(chapters = odyssey_chapters, characters = odyssey_characters)

HTML("present.html")

Present Day: Lessons and Looking Forward

Having examined my literacy journey over quite the length of time, and quite the range of skills, there is one lesson that I can take away from this Autobiography. That is: I am never done learning, even if I think I know it all, especially then, I must continue to learn whatever I can about literacy, and to seek out new ways of making meaning out of literature and literacy. Moving forward, I will continue to approach my literacy journey with an open mind, ready to learn more about the infinite importances, intricacies, and implications of literacy, and how it permeates every aspect of my life.

HTML("references.html")

References

Chaliakopoulos, A. (2021, September 6). The Myth of Daedalus and Icarus: Fly Between the Extremes. TheCollector. https://www.thecollector.com/daedalus-and-icarus/

Douglass, F. (2009). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1845)

Fitzgerald, F. S. (1925). The Great Gatsby. Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Gee, J. P. (1989). What Is Literacy?. Journal of Education, 171(1), 18–25. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ399919#:~:text=EISSN%3A%20N%2FA-,What%20Is%20Literacy%3F,formal%20process%20of%20language%20learning .

Homer. (2018). The Odyssey. Css Books. (Original work published 800 B.C.E.)

Kennedy, J. (2003). Forces That Shape the Bay Lawrence Hall of Science «Jeff Kennedy Associates, Inc.Jkainc.com. http://jkainc.com/projects/science/natural-history/lawrence-hall-of-science/#:~:text=Forces%20shaping%20the%20bay%20interpreted

Ovid. (1989). Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Spring Publications. (Original work published 8 C.E.)

Sagan, C. (2008). Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark. Paw Prints. (Original work published 1997)

Scribner, S. (1984). Literacy in Three Metaphors. American Journal of Education, 93(1), 6–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1085087

Vygotsky, L. (1930). Mind and Society. Harvard University Press. https://www.unilibre.edu.co/bogota/pdfs/2016/mc16.pdf